In memory of an unmemorable afternoon

The mouse doesn't work so well, the cursor refuses to be bossed around the screen. The room's despicable messy, you wonder how anyone could live here. You don't want to listen to the song any more, but still can't bring yourself to change it. The mailbox is empty and lunch wasn't that interesting either. The sitcom's been on pause for a while now, and you let it stay that way. Milosz and Vargas Llosa lie silent by the dusty desk, frozen by inertia. That article about obscure Italian digestives trumps poetry this time.

The usual work's there to be done, along with the usual plans, but you don't feel like it. You don't feel like doing anything anybody in the world would expect you to do, even if that anybody is yourself. The most common and characteristic physiological response to all this is sleep, so you don't feel like that either. So you sit there on the bed, feet uniformly pressed into the cold floor, traversing those words in plastic, protesting silently against life's oppression.

Then something gets ticking. What if the afternoon refuses to be reined in? Maybe you could give in to it, and let it have whatever it sought from you. Why fight something when you could side with it?

Sing that song as loudly as you can, until your neighbour's forced to wonder what the hell's going on in the other room. Remember a stranger's face. If you can't, cook up one. Take that chronograph into your hands and count down the seconds. Twenty four, twenty five, twenty six... fifty eight, fifty nine, sixty/zero(???), one, two... twenty four, twenty five, twenty six... you get the idea. Take a paper and try to draw an 8x8 square grid with your eyes closed. Then darken alternate squares, like a chessboard. Preserve the results for posterity.

Stretch out this forgettable chunk of time on the pin board of memory and pin it down with the brightly coloured pins that are words, paint it with the flourescence of ennui, spruce it up with the scent of the day's heated shadows and burnish it with the air's repetitive sounds of music and there you have it, a vibrant piece of throbbing memory with an invisible watermark beneath that reads, I lived through this.

Sometimes life can be unmemorable.

But then, you can always make the memory livable.

I love the sound of

Wind trampled by rubber.

Television playing to empty furniture.

A stranger's knuckles rapping on the door.

Slushy feet in wet evening mud.

Tearing open an envelope to get to the letter inside it.

Muffled music from the neighbour's earphones.

A lie escaping the roof of a tongue.

Bunny slippers treading over pebbly hard earth.

The triumphant flick of the Enter button.

A fountain pen's cap snugly clicking into place.

A squeaky ceiling fan on a sweaty afternoon.

Static that accompanies outdated videotapes.

Rummaging through a brown cardboard box of childhood memories.

Periodic ticks of a grandfather's walking stick.

Attempts to discreetly fold candy wrap in a silent classroom.

Water queuing up in spirals to disappear down a drain.

A newborn's nails scratching the walls of a bassinet.

Drawing nines in the breeze.

A metallic fork sinking into chocolate pastry.

The unmindful taps of waiting feet.

A smile by the darkness of a moving window.

An anchor crashing into the tranquil sand of a sea bed.

Canvas

The room is ivory white, devoid of even a hint of furniture. The air is still, without a sense of movement, as if holding its breath in anticipation. The walls extend gracefully into the distance, like long lost friends. The ceiling and the floor seem to appear suddenly, as if from nowhere. Music flows, through dots chiselled into heavenly patterns in the air. On the floor, there is a tangled piece of black thread, an old crumpled postcard, a spool of brown tape, a child's colouring book, a broken pair of spectacles and a little wooden cube with dots carved into its faces.

They sit there sprawled on the floor, backs leant against each other, facing opposite directions. An ink bottle lies sideways on the ground beside them, its blue contents let loose onto the soft floor. He rolls words between his inky palms, tapping his feet lazily to a ground drifting in thought. Her eyes are closed, head tilted lingeringly towards the ceiling, the song's melody pirouetting on her tongue. Patches of inky blue adorn their clothing, as if drawing shapes to the tune of a waltzing zephyr. Memory paints itself into the distance, a peevish shadow creeping through a pale white darkness.

The artist steps back from the canvas, surrendering the tableau to existence. Wavy shapes that dissolve into the ivory emptiness of the room, like smudgy watercolour. A bird frozen on the threshold of a soaring flight, outstretched wings on the cusp of a cloudless horizon.

Note to Neruda

To think it took me this long to know you,

Pablo Neruda,

is to know how unjust time sometimes can be.

Fouettes

Things. With names.

Eyes. Seen through another's.

Dots. Splashed into patterns.

Dusty jeans. Tattered soles.

Voices hopscotching in space. Drafted into memory.

Years broken down into moments. Like rusty fences by a vanishing roadside.

Carved spaces. Elegant absurdities.

Fouettes for an epiphany.

A montage. Words.

An inaudible sigh.

I'm not here. I never was.

In Conversation

*. I love tonight's sky. May be the same as every night but as it peeps at me from behind a tree with streetlight tinting the leaves yellow, amid chaotic four-wheelers and traffic lights, I type this to you knowing full well there won't be another moment like this for all eternity. And that makes it worth a memory. [9:31 pm | 16th Feb, 09]

*. Chrome yellow chalk on a green board. Codes on a spreadsheet. A floating screen with boxes. And all I feel is Yorke's falsettos resonating in my soul. [10:59 am | 2nd Sep, 09]

*. We are carefree spirits, trapped more inside ourselves than the world that we live in. Only when we learn how to liberate our selves will we be able to learn what it means to be our true selves, to be what we truly are. Maybe then the world shall turn itself upside down, maybe all the wrongs shall right themselves, and we see everything for what it plainly is, not as a hindrance or an opportunity, not as a boon or a bane, but just for what it is, and learn to make something of it in life. [6:36 pm | 27th Mar, 09]

*. It's in moments like these that I feel the sea rise within me, trying to break away from its own waves, the very waves that constrain it, to be a seamless whole for a moment, only a moment, to stare back at the ever-changing world that created it, and be, just be. [11:23 pm | 13th Mar, 09]

*. A wiper erasing the traces of a rainy massacre on the windshield, a sky burning up in lament, a stranger's voice in the air, neon signs on a forehead. [6:37 pm | 17th Aug, 09]

*. ...that is what we are, a shifty smile carved into the lips of time, going around in shapeless circles, swaying to the wonders of existence. Like a paper boat on a rainy street, a little white sphere on a roulette, or a feather in a sandstorm. [11:23 pm | 22nd Aug, 09]

*. Can you see the clouds ganging up on the sun outside right now? One of those poignant moments nature always serves up in an uncannily bright texture that places it halfway between melancholy and brio, and leaves you unsure what to make of it in the end. [5:39 pm | 31st May, 09]

*. Sleepy words on the blog for the evening gone. Sleepier SMSes. An acoustic guitar plays to a raspy voice, and I'm stuck in a moment, swaying into a swirling dream. [3:16 am | 30th Aug, 09]

*. There is a white house in the distance. It is smiling. The shy evening is forgiving, leaves rustling to an invisible music. Here, now, beneath these red bricks of history, I am a dream, a river trapped in metal beneath a salty sky, a collective word waiting on the world's trembling lips. [7:02 pm | 8th Aug, 09]

Poem

Cloistered from the world by four walls of hazy white,
sinking into a light that devoured invisible air

burdened by all that went before it,
apprehensive of all that was to come after it

caught up in tangled ripples of memory,
teetering at the edge of obscurity

a moment screamed for its release,
and the poet obliged.

Vertigo

The night flows,

pounding at obstinate windows,

prowling the edges,

peeling away

the world's masquerade,

caressing the insatiable passion

of gravity

But tonight, we float.

Up

and away.

Beyond the prosaic

tedium of gravity,

into the soaring

wings of darkness.

Up

and away.

Like music.

Like flaring tungsten

suspended in frosted glass.

Like dandelions

diving over mossy hills.

Like dreams

on the threshold of a lingering sleep.

Like resonating shadows

drifting away into the great unknown,

into the endless spirals

of a seductive nothingness.

Bulletin

2:37 Graphs in black and blue.
3:02 Ordeals with a sun.
3:14 Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.
4:16 Circuitous snacks.
5:19 Disappearing letters. Sticky nap.
6:27 Lifehouse. Sunset with Monet.
6:58 The Economist on Afghanistan. The labours of Sisyphus.
7:34 Pepsi with Ross Geller.
8:02 Unfinished poems. Count+3.
8:25 Rice with green peas.
9:11 Slippery heads on a first floor. Hardwork.
10:54 Lemon Mint juice. Boiled corn.
11:13 Vocals with Thom Yorke.
11:52 Conversations with a whiteboard.
12:24 "Good prose is like a window pane".
12:59 Midnight walks by red-bricked corridors and whispering trees.
1:30 Unannounced dials on a keypad. Hello. Carefree chuckles.
1:56 Early morning with the New Yorker.
2:35 Advertising in the air. Tony the Tiger. The bloody innovation of The Vampire Diaries.
3:04 Eyes spinning in brownish white circles, slicing the ceiling into tiny arcs of scattered light.
3:07 The screen dims. White fades into black.

Who are you

Raging dreams
trembling through the icy fabric of reality,
leaving flaming trails in your wake,
who are you?

Fervent tears
slipping into the night's unbound spaces,
stirring up an ocean's gentle lament,
who are you?

Colourless eyes
floating into my mirrored thoughts,
unravelling the tangles of my bloody heart,
who are you?

A wavy song
murmuring into the amorphous darkness
of my wandering memory,
who are you?

A stony silence
digging your fingernails into my sweaty skin
beneath a pearly saturday night sky,
who are you?

On reading poetry

I've read hundreds of marvellously great poems over the past few days and I mean poems that are universally great, not personal favourites. [The current scope of this entry can not include (it probably never can) questioning the poetic merits of a coterie that consists of names the least of which include but are not limited to Neruda, Plath, Bolano, Whitman, Eliot and Larkin so let us please refrain from it.]

But the lines that captured my heart and squeezed it till it bled to ecstasy are by none of those. I don't always think of Borges as the greatest poet I've ever read, but I am yet to read a mind that so consistently produces words beautiful enough to put the inadequacy of language itself to shame, as effortlessly as the Argentinian can.

I read all of the others for days while I read Borges only for a few minutes (that too to refer to an old poem he wrote about Browning, coming upon these lines by accident) and I was so excited to write an entry to express my infinite debt to Larkin and Neruda but maybe that's for another day. The compass isn't working any more, there's too much interference. My mind's been brought to the ground, and I know it shows in these simple, flat words. I shall not read any more poetry tonight, let alone try to write any of my own, for I've had my fill.

But the days are a web of small troubles,
and is there a greater blessing
than to be the ash of which oblivion is made?

That, is poetry.

Jottings

*.
Is the chimney angry
when it spits flames at the patient sky?
Is the violin wailing
when it rouses the air around its feet?
Is the land patient
when it lets you stampede it in perpetuity?
Is the sunflower smiling
when it offers itself to the sun’s radiance?
Is the moon shy
when it hides beneath the milky cloud?

Who is to say,
who is to listen?

*. Our life is characterised by the search of exceptions. Maybe that is the elusive truth we seek in love, that unique exception that defines us, reaffirming our own uniqueness in return. An exception to undo all that's been done, one that challenges us, and unmakes all that's been made of us. The exception to a life that has so far been lived without one.

Some find theirs, some make theirs.
The rest just become somebody else's exceptions.

*. Intolerance is a vice, they say. But then, I ask myself, isn't a condemnation of intolerance against the very basis of the argument, that we have to practise tolerance? If we aren't tolerant of intolerance, doesn't that mean we are intolerant ourselves?

*. Living a moment, and letting a moment live you, are two divergently different ways of making memory. The first is an extension of the second, the second is a contraction of the first.

*. A poem is a celebration of impermanence, a solitary vestige that narrates a world as it existed one lost moment in time, exalted by emotion, embellished by detail, a miniscule packet of memory impervious to the oppressive present that threatens its immortality, like a placid piece of land in the middle of an endless ocean, enduring the raging storm of time, marked indelibly by a creaky old woodboard left behind on the landscape by the poet that silently proclaims "I was here."